1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to information signal processing, and in particular to the field of processing time sequential information signals, such as video signals, for the purpose of compressing the amount of information to be transferred from an encoding site to a decoding site. A particular use of the invention is in the communication of color video data over telephone lines.
2. Prior Art
Encoding of digital television signals ordinarily requires a transmission rate of approximately 200 Mbits/s. Recent developments in coding systems have permitted the transmission rate to be cut to less than 2 Mbits/s. Coding systems using block oriented analysis of video picture frames and processing by a conventional hybrid discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficient permit transmission at rates of between 64 Kbits/s and 384 Kbits/s. Such a system is described in Gerken and Schiller, "A Low Bit-Rate Image Sequence Coder Combining A Progressive DPCM On Interleaved Rasters With A Hybrid DCT Technique", IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Vol. SAC-5, No. 7, August, 1987. Adaptive coding techniques applied to such DCT processing have allowed video data transmission at rates as low as one to two bits per pixel, as is described in Chen and Smith, "Adaptive Coding of Monochrome and Color Images", IEEE Transactions on Communications, Vol. COM-25, No. 11, Nov. 19, 1977. However, information transmitted at such low data rates seriously affects the ability to reconstruct a sufficient number of frames per second so that a real time picture is acceptable to a viewer. High capacity telephone lines are available which will carry transmission at a rate of up to 1.544 Mbits/s, but such lines are extremely expensive at a dedicated use rate, and are still quite expensive at a scheduled use rate. Lower capacity telephone lines are available which permit transmission at rates of up to 56 Kbits/s and 64 Kbits/s. Relatively expensive video digital and coding devices are commercially available which will transmit a video signal at 56,000 bits per second, so that it is necessary to utilize a combination of a device of this nature with the high capacity 1.544 Mbits/s telephone line to allow a framing speed much faster than about one frame per second. The current transmission rate limit of ordinary telephone lines approaches 18,000 bits per second, so that transmission of real time sequencing of video pictures over ordinary telephone lines has been viewed in the prior art as not being feasible.
Various schemes for reducing the amount of redundancy of information to be transmitted in a digital video signal have been used. One technique is to utilize a slow scan camera; and another technique is to transmit every nth scanning line for each frame. Another technique involves the sending of only those parts of a picture frame which are deemed to be important or to have changed in some significant manner, by dividing the picture frame into a number of segments or blocks which are typically 3.times.3 or 4.times.4 groups of pixels, and analyzing the content of the blocks. These techniques tend to also reduce the resolution of the video picture.
Another technique in the reduction of transmission time which does not decrease the resolution of a picture transmitted is run length encoding. In run length encoding, the scan lines of a picture frame are encoded as a value of the color content of a series of pixels and the length of the sequence of pixels having that value or range of values. The values may be a measure of the amplitude of a video signal, or other properties of such video signals, such as luminance or chrominance. An example of a system which utilizes run length coding of amplitude of video signals is U.S. Pat. No. 3,609,244 (Mounts). In that system, a frame memory also determines frame to frame differences, so that only those differences from one frame to the next are to be transmitted. Another example of a method for transmitting video signals as compressed run length values which also utilizes statistical coding of frequent values to reduce the number of bits required to represent data is U.S. Pat. No. 4,420,771 (Pirsch).
Ideally, compression of color video information to allow real time sequencing of picture frames at a rate of up to 15 frames per second, and at bit rates as low as 11,500 bits per second would be desirable, to allow the communication of color video data over ordinary telephone lines. A video data compression system able to achieve equivalent data transmission rates as systems using higher quality telephone lines with more efficient and less costly equipment than is currently available would also be desirable.